In a Disused Graveyard

by Robert Frost

THE living come with grassy tread

To read the gravestones on the hill;

The graveyard draws the living still,

But never any more the dead.

5  

The verses in it say and say:

"The ones who living come today

To read the stones and go away

Tomorrow dead will come to stay."

So sure of death the marbles rhyme,

10  

Yet can't help marking all the time

How no one dead will seem to come.

What is it men are shrinking from?

It would be easy to be clever

And tell the stones: Men hate to die

15  

And have stopped dying now forever.

I think they would believe the lie.








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New Hampshire by Robert Frost

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Transcribed and formatted for Internet reading, with addition of line numbers and edits to footnotes, from the 1923 (Henry Holt and Company) hardcover edition of New Hampshire by Robert Frost.